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Monday, August 15, 2016

Last weekend I went to a barber for the first time in six years, not to attend to anything on the top of my head (as I’ve been seeing to that myself) but to allow a professional to tidy up my mustache. For a relatively small sum of money, my mustache got twenty minutes’ worth of snipping and shaping, and I got some tips on how I can keep it looking good until the next time I make an appointment. I highly recommend it.

While sitting the the chair, the barber asked me why I chose to grow this thing in the first place, and I actually didn’t know how to answer. Here, then, is every possible reason I can think of.

Because the fact that I’ve had a buzzed head for the last six years has limited what I can do to change my appearance, and growing a mustache seemed like a shorter-term investment than a face tattoo

Because manliness?

But similarly and separately to connect with my heritage as a gay homosexual

To repulse women

More specifically to make a woman in front of me in line at the grocery store glance back, glance back again and then none-too-discreetly slip into another line, presumably because she thought I looked like a creep

To look like a creep, maybe

To provoke female acquaintances who have never otherwise commented on my physical appearance to tell me that they hate my mustache and that I should remove it

Apparently to make twentysomethings on various apps begin conversations with “Hey, daddy” or something thereabouts

So that when I take an Instagram selfie and have it show up on my Tumblr my photo then gets reblogged on various fetish sites of varying levels of NSFW-ness

To give myself a single distinguishing physical characteristic (finally)

To draw attention away from my unpleasant personality

Because I’d grown accustomed to the various asymmetricalities of my body and needed a new one to obsess over

If I’m being really honest, I may have grown it to punk my friend, who’d invited me to be a groomsmen in his wedding but whose bride did not include facial hair stylings on her PDFed guide to appropriate groomsmen looks

And to continue that honestly, I’ve kept it maybe because I think his bride suspects that this was the case and I’m scared she will beat me up if she knew that I’d made an effort to become “that random guy with a mustache” in her wedding photos

Because the groom himself cannot grow one

Because neither my brother nor my father can grow one, now that I think about it